


When You Smile

by Caro_the_Poet



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:55:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27895666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caro_the_Poet/pseuds/Caro_the_Poet
Summary: He wonders how she learned to smile like that. Is she doing it on purpose? Is she trying to drive him crazy? Because it’s sort of working, and the mere fact of that has him impressed. He’s not easily impressed.
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill
Comments: 38
Kudos: 139





	When You Smile

_This is how I came to love you:  
In the quiet spaces  
The moments between heartbeats  
The trails between the stars  
The infinity between atoms.  
All was chaos  
Smoke and mirrors  
Impossibility and despair  
But you, my love--  
You were both the solid ground beneath me  
And the wings that brought me home._

*

He hardly ever smiles, not really. 

She’s been on SG-1 for almost a month before she really thinks about it, but once she’s noticed it nags at her like an equation she can’t solve. 

The contrast between his absurd sense of humor and his serious face is a bit jarring. And he’s nearly always trying to make her laugh—telling some terrible joke and then looking at her sideways to gauge her reaction. God help her, she loses it every _single_ time. Her bottom lip is practically raw from biting back laughter. And then he turns away with a self-satisfied smirk that makes her curse her complete lack of self-control. 

But even still, a smirk isn’t a smile; and she is struck by the way the corner of his mouth can turn up without ever reaching his deep brown eyes; how those eyes can twinkle with mirth and still look so deeply, unreachably sad. 

When Daniel tells her about Charlie, it stabs her between the ribs like a physical pain. It makes sense now. She can’t fathom it. She understands, with terrible clarity, why he went to Abydos hoping he would never return. And she knows why, the one time she saw his smile fully reach his eyes, was when he was reunited with Skaara. Her heart breaks for him. 

Sam is a fixer, and this is a thing she can’t fix. 

*

Her smile is mesmerizing. 

He can’t look away the first time he sees it. It explodes across his vision like some mind-blowing combination of sunshine and starlight and he _hates_ clichés but he can’t think of any other way to put it. 

She’s radiant. 

He wonders how she learned to smile like that. _Is she doing it on purpose? Is she trying to drive him crazy?_ Because it’s sort of working, and the mere fact of that has him impressed. He’s not easily impressed.

It takes his breath away when she sparkles all over the control room, throwing theoretical physics around like it’s as simple as an addition problem. When she discovers a new piece of alien technology and practically vibrates with enthusiasm while she explains it to whoever will listen (he can’t listen. It’s too much, _she’s_ too much, and he might spontaneously combust). When she steps out of the gate onto the fresh ground of an unexplored planet, taking in the surroundings with unabashed wonder. When she ducks her head and presses her lips together, desperately trying not to laugh at whatever ridiculous thing he’s just said ( _God, _that’s the worst of all. She genuinely thinks he’s funny and she’s incapable of hiding it and he is henceforth _compelled_ to say stupid things just to get her to smile like that. He has absolutely no control over it). And it’s so strange, because he never expected that he could feel like this again. Whatever “this” is.__

_It’s against regulations, is what it is_. So he reins in the unnamed feelings as best he can and pretends not to notice how the whole energy of a room changes when she walks into it. How the weight of grief and regret, always pressing at his shoulders and dragging at the edges of his consciousness, recedes and lightens when she looks up at him with dancing blue eyes and smiling lips. The pain never goes away, but _she_ —she helps him forget, if only for a moment. 

Even so, it’s four years before he realizes he loves her. Loves her with every cell in his body, with every piece of his fractured heart. It’s not merely an attraction or a crush anymore. If he lost her, if he could never see her smile again, there would be no life for him after. It was as simple as that. But he doesn’t tell her. He takes comfort in the hope that whatever he’s feeling, she’s feeling it too. Some things don’t need to be communicated in words. 

Another three years and everything changes. He’s dying ( _again_ ) from an overload of Ancient knowledge, and Carter desperately tries to tell him— _something_. He won’t let her, because he can't let it end like this. He wishes he could see her smile, one last time. Instead the last thing he sees is her grief-stricken face, begging him to live. 

__*_ _

“What’s the matter with you lately? You’re so quiet. You hardly smile anymore,” Pete says, one morning a couple of months after the defeat of Anubis. 

She doesn’t know what to say. _I can’t. Not while he’s stuck in a stasis chamber in Antarctica and may be—_

She can’t think that word. She’s stuck in the no-man’s-land between grief and hope. 

Pete doesn’t, _can’t_ understand. She couldn’t begin to explain it to him. How does she tell him that she misses another man so much that she can hardly breathe? That Jack’s brown eyes are the only thing she can see when she closes hers? She can count on two hands the number of times she saw him really smile, with his mouth and with his eyes, and most of those times he was looking at her. At night, when she’s trying to sleep and can’t, she goes over every instance in her head. _Beneath the surface of the ice planet. The time he made a bet that she wouldn’t actually go on vacation and pretended he hadn't. The first and second times he asked her to go fishing with him._

___God_ , that last one hurts the most. She’d give anything for him to ask her again._ _

__“I’m sorry, Pete,” she says. “I’m just tired.”_ _

__It isn’t even a lie. She’s exhausted and Jack may never come back and the light has gone out of her world._ _

__*_ _

He wakes up on Thor’s ship. The replicators are once again trying to take over the galaxy. Even worse, they have Carter. He doesn’t react outwardly to that news, but he feels it settle in his bones like heavy metal. He makes jokes, because It’s What He Does. But nothing about this is funny and all he can think is that he has to find her. He has to see her smile again. 

He’s down on the planet with Daniel and Teal’c and the replicators are escaping undefeated and Carter is nowhere to be found. He’s just about to fully lose it when Daniel says, “We’re picking up another life sign in the area!” 

_Carter_. He shouts her name over and over, his voice rough with desperation. 

“She’s here, I found her!” 

He takes off running in the direction of Daniel’s voice and sure enough, there she is—lying on the ground, exhausted and pale and beautiful. His mind goes blank, he doesn’t even register his own actions as he falls to his knees in front of her and runs his hand over her thigh. “Are you all right?” 

She looks up at him and he can see the joy, the utter relief in her eyes. She doesn’t even answer his question. All she says is, “It’s good to see you, sir.” 

“Likewise,” he replies, because if he says anything more he will give away too much. 

She smiles, and his world is right again. 

__*_ _

Pete has given her a ring, and she’s looking at Jack like she expects him to have an opinion about it. Not that he doesn’t have one—he just thinks it’s damn near intolerable that she’s asking. 

It seems like she’s given up on him and he can’t blame her but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell. Things were never the same after she was stranded on _Prometheus_. It was probably his fault, too, since she’d accidentally called him Jack—while she was coming out of a _coma_ , no less--and he’d been a dick about it. Because of course he had. 

He thinks she should be happier, though, if she’s actually going to marry this idiot. But she’s been walking around the base in a fog, or holed up in her lab, deliberately not talking to him and barely smiling. He’s never seen her so subdued. He has to come to her lab and ask her directly what's going on before she tells him. 

She doesn’t seem like she wants to marry Pete. She looks so tired; her cheeks are hollow and there are dark circles under her eyes. He doesn’t know what to say, but he knows what he _can’t_ say. He can’t tell her not to marry Pete. As much as he thinks the guy is a douche, he’s self-aware enough to know that might just be his own jealousy. He can’t torpedo her chance at happiness, especially when he has nothing to offer her. 

So when she asks, “What about you? If things had been different?” and looks at him with sad, pleading eyes, he makes his face blank and says, “I wouldn’t be here.”  
It’s not really an answer to the question, but she understands his meaning: he’s not going to give her one. 

Her face falls, and he feels like he’s been punched in the gut. Everything in him wants to wrap her up in his arms and whisper, _Please don’t marry him. I have never, not for one single moment, stopped loving you_. Loving her is like breathing. He’ll stop needing her when he stops needing oxygen. 

She turns away, and the conversation is over. The next day, she comes in with the ring on her finger. 

There is no smile in her eyes. 

__*_ _

It’s a year later, and they are in Minnesota. Sitting on a dock, balancing rods and reels in loose fingers, trying to think of how to start a conversation they’ve kept locked away for too many years. 

He knows she broke up with Pete, although she didn’t tell him. It was one of those wordless conversations they’ve gotten so used to having—he looked at her bare ring finger and she saw him look and their eyes met and that was that. In that same exchange of glances, she also knew instinctively that he wasn’t seeing Kerry anymore. 

“We should have done this years ago,” she says finally, and she hopes he knows she isn’t talking about fishing. 

“Yes. Well. Let’s not dwell,” he replies. He turns to her and smiles with his eyes. Daniel and Teal’c come around the corner with chairs and a cooler and the conversation is over, but she files away the image of that smile with all the others. 

Daniel goes to bed early that night and then Teal’c disappears outside with suspicious speed, leaving the two of them in the living room, clutching their beers and wondering what to say. What does one say after so many years of pretending? 

“Sir—” 

“ _Don’t_. Don’t call me that. Not here.” 

“ _Jack_.” 

He looks at her expectantly. 

She chews her bottom lip. A smile creeps over her face and he catches his breath because she’s _so damn beautiful_. 

“What are you thinking about?” he asks, his voice soft. 

“I was remembering after Fifth released me on that planet, and you and Daniel and Teal’c found me. I had thought you were still in stasis in Antarctica, that you might even be…dead. And then, there you were.” She sighs. “I was so happy and relieved I almost kissed you.” 

His eyebrows fly up at that admission, and she laughs. 

He can’t breathe. 

“I knew it,” he says. 

“You did?” 

“The way you smiled. I felt like I’d been kissed.” 

She presses her lips together and ducks her head (like she always does), and then her face turns pensive. She looks up at him with solemn eyes. “I can’t pretend anymore, Jack." 

_So this is it then_. He clears his throat, because suddenly his voice doesn’t want to work. “I can’t either.” 

Her eyes light up and her shoulders relax and she covers her face with her hands. He gets up and squats down in front of her, pulling her hands away from her face. “Hey. It’s okay.” He presses a kiss to her palm. 

She takes a shaky breath. “I’ve loved you since the second year." 

His face breaks into a grin, his eyes twinkling. “I’m that irresistible, huh?” 

She laughs and her teary eyes sparkle. “I knew it when alternate-reality-me kissed you and I wanted to kill her.” 

“I think I would have paid good money to see that.” 

“You _bastard_ ,” she says, but she’s still laughing and she wraps her arms around him. He buries his face in her neck and kisses her there, like he’s dreamed about doing more times than he can count. 

“I can’t remember not loving you,” he says finally. 

She pulls away from him slightly, but only so she can lean her forehead against his. “So what do we do?” 

He sighs. “We figure it out tomorrow. Retirement, reassignment—there are plenty of options, and we’ve earned them. For now, we do _this_.” 

He kisses her. He feels her smile against his lips and thinks, _So this is what it’s like_. He’s always wondered. 

When they pull apart, breathless and tingling, they are both smiling. She’s glowing like sunshine and sparkling like starlight and the planets are aligned and he’s running out of clichés. 

He feels it all welling up inside him, joy and sheer relief and sadness for all the time they lost, all the misunderstanding. He doesn’t realize there are tears on his face until she’s gently brushing them away. 

“What is it?” she asks, but he thinks that she must know, because there are still tears in her eyes, too. 

“I just can’t believe we finally got here,” he says. 

“You didn’t really think it would ever happen?” 

He smirks just a little. “No, I mean I’m shocked Daniel hasn’t interrupted us yet.” 

He thinks, then, that her face lit up with laughter, through the sheen of happy tears, is the most beautiful he’s ever seen her. 

And she thinks, as she watches his brown eyes shine with unbridled happiness, that she’s never seen him smile quite like this before. 

This smile is hers. 

This smile is home. 


End file.
